Diatribes and querelles among European and Western intellectuals are very well known, while everything related to our times' Arab cultural world is submerged with a flow of information which keeps describing it as monolithic world eternally overwhelmed by the weight of religion and modernity against tradition polemics. Thus the existence of lively debates and political, ideological and, most of all, cultural disputes has been ignored…
But how could a distant observer get to know about today's Arab intellectuals role and what they talk about? … Here comes the utility and originality of this study by Monica Ruocco. Through the methodical analysis of one of contemporary Arab culture's most important journals, the Lebanese al-Adab, she traces with attentive critical eye 40 years of Arabs' recent history, so dense of political and social changes...